Modelling Legionnaires' disease: Lessons learned from invertebrate and vertebrate animal models

The study of virulence of Legionella pneumophila and its interactions with its hosts has been predominantly conducted in cellulo in the past decades. Although easy to implement and allowing the dissection of molecular pathways underlying host-pathogen interactions, these cellular models fail to provide conditions of the complex environments encountered by the bacteria during the infection of multicellular organisms. To improve our understanding of human infection, several animal models have been developed. This review provides an overview of the invertebrate and vertebrate models that have been established to study L. pneumophila infection and that are alternatives to the classical mouse model, which does not recall human infection with L. pneumophila well. Finally we provide insight in the main contributions made by these models along with their pros and cons.

Automated summary

The study of the virulence of Legionella pneumophila and its interactions with hosts has mostly been conducted using cellular models. However, these models fail to accurately represent the complexity of the environment encountered by the bacteria during infection in multicellular organisms. To better understand human infection, various animal models have been developed as alternatives to the traditional mouse model. This review provides an overview of these invertebrate and vertebrate models and their contributions, as well as their advantages and disadvantages.